Music You Buy, Music You Don't

Let me date myself by saying that when I was young music was sold on large black discs made of polyvinyl chloride. I was not a spoiled kid by any means, but I always managed to scrape together enough allowance to buy the things I really wanted. This included music albums. Most of the albums I purchased had one song on them that I really enjoyed, and the needle would ride those grooves again and again while the rest of the platter remained untouched. Having other funding priorities, such as comic books and action figures, my album purchases remained a modest one of two every year.

When I got a little older and purchased a cassette deck the shape of my music collection changed. I started using the tape deck to record individual songs off of the radio, saving me the trouble of buying an entire album. No, an eleven-year-old does not care if his recording has DJ banter at the beginning and is cut off at the end by and advertisement. Let’s be honest here, we’re not talking about a nuanced performance of a Beethoven symphony - this is some guy with long hair screaming above the same three power chords for four minutes. Despite the new technology of the tape recorder, I still found myself at the record store buying one or two albums every year.

By the time I reached my early teenage years the dual cassette deck with "high speed dub" was commonplace and my friends and I enjoyed copying each other’s albums and piecing together our own mixes of hits that we liked. We’d trade tapes at school, and copy the copies of other people’s copies. Did we care if the tunes we were sharing were the audio equivalent of a document that had been faxed back and forth too many times, becoming barely legible? Of course not. Nevertheless there would be those one or two albums every year that I actually wanted to own, so I bought them.

The late teens and early twenties are the sweet spot for the recording industry. It’s when the music speaks to you and your generation, and the ratio of disposable income to common sense is peaking. For me this was the era of the Compact Disc: a new standard of audio purity, and the price tag to go with it. My father believed it was all a conspiracy to make him repurchase his entire music collection in order to transition from vinyl. Most of my albums didn’t really interest me anymore so I only had to repurchase a select few. For me the CD basically changed nothing. I still made the same one or two album purchases every year, and I still used my tape recorder to make copies off of other people’s CD’s.

I got my first broadband connection right around the time Napster was created. Napster made me feel like a kid again, waiting for a song to come on the radio so I could record it with my tape deck. In many cases, the songs were probably the same ones I had taped in my youth. Only this was infinitely better. I could simply think of a song I wanted to listen to, do a quick search and download and within minutes I’d be listening to it – and I’d have a decent quality copy to boot. 128kbit MP3 audio isn’t CD quality by any stretch, but one constant through the decades is that popular music doesn’t require high fidelity to be enjoyed. Did my music purchasing habits change during Napster? Of course not. My norm of buying one of two albums per year did not falter.

I don’t know how many songs I downloaded off of Napster, but that hard drive has long since crashed and I don’t really miss it to be honest. I haven’t downloaded any music since the shutdown of Napster because it isn't worth the hassle. I guess as an individual I could be characterized by the RIAA as a success story, in terms of their actions to halt illegal downloading. But have they made any more money from me? I still buy one or two albums every year, which has been the norm throughout my life. If anything I bought more albums during the heyday of Napster.

The CDs that I own, I own for a reason. I want the high quality recording and the liner notes. I want the artist to be rewarded for creating something that I value enough to grant space on my shelf. The whole point here is that the tape recordings of my youth and the downloaded MP3s have always been the crap that I wouldn’t have bought anyway. Imagine an invisible fly on the wall in a movie theater enjoying the show without a ticket. His presence is costing you nothing. He doesn’t care if you if you shoo him out or not, but doing so is a negative revenue scenario for you because you have to buy a swatter.

I probably buy less music than the average American does, but I think there are plenty of people out there like me. We pay the premium prices for the music we really like. There is a larger body of music out there that would be nice to have but isn’t worth the price. If there is a technology that makes it easy to get disposable music for free then I will use it, otherwise I'll simply do without the music.